How to Migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce

Shopify is fast to launch, but its monthly fees, transaction charges on non-Shopify Payments checkouts, and rigid Liquid theme system push a lot of growing stores toward a platform they fully own. WooCommerce, the open-source WordPress plugin that powers a large share of online stores worldwide, is the most common destination: you keep your data, avoid per-sale platform cuts, and gain unlimited control over templates, checkout, and integrations.

That freedom comes with responsibility. Unlike Shopify's fully hosted, all-in-one model, WooCommerce needs its own hosting, SSL, security hardening, payment gateway, and ongoing WordPress maintenance. Handled carelessly, a Shopify-to-WooCommerce move can tank your organic traffic overnight because the URL structures, product handles, and blog paths are completely different between the two systems.

This guide walks through why businesses make the switch, what actually changes or breaks, and the exact steps to migrate your catalog, customers, and orders while protecting the SEO rankings you have spent years earning.

Why businesses move from Shopify to WooCommerce

The motivations are usually a mix of cost, control, and content strategy. Shopify's subscription tiers plus app fees add up quickly, and unless you use Shopify Payments, you pay an extra transaction fee on every order. WooCommerce itself is free; you pay only for hosting, a payment gateway's standard processing rates, and whichever extensions you choose.

• Lower recurring cost at scale, with no platform transaction fee on top of your card processor.
• Full ownership of your code, database, and customer data, with no risk of a platform TOS change forcing your hand.
• Content and SEO depth from WordPress, which is a far stronger blogging and long-form content engine than Shopify's basic blog.
• Unlimited customization of checkout, product types, pricing rules, and B2B workflows through PHP and thousands of plugins.
• Freedom from app dependency, where features Shopify locks behind paid apps (bundles, custom fields, advanced filtering) are often native or free in WooCommerce.

The tradeoff is that you become your own host and sysadmin. If your team does not want to manage updates, backups, and security, factor in a maintenance retainer or a partner like our WordPress development company before committing.

What changes and what breaks

Because Shopify and WooCommerce are built on entirely different architectures, almost nothing transfers automatically. Knowing what breaks up front is what separates a clean migration from a traffic disaster.

• URLs change. Shopify forces the /products/, /collections/, /pages/, and /blogs/news/ path prefixes. WooCommerce defaults to /product/, /product-category/, and standard WordPress permalinks. Every URL that changes needs a 301 redirect.
• Apps do not carry over. Shopify apps are proprietary. Reviews, subscriptions, upsells, loyalty, and email flows must be rebuilt with WooCommerce or WordPress equivalents.
• Theme and design must be rebuilt. Liquid templates cannot run on WordPress. You will choose a WooCommerce theme or build a custom one to match your brand.
• Checkout and payments are reconfigured. You will set up WooCommerce Payments, Stripe, or PayPal fresh, including webhooks and tax settings.
• Customer passwords cannot be exported. Shopify hashes passwords and never releases them, so customers will need to reset on first login.
• Structured data, meta titles, and descriptions from Shopify SEO apps must be recreated in an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math.

Product data, orders, and customer records can be moved, but they need careful mapping. Review our full website migration SEO checklist before you touch anything in production.

Step 1: Export your Shopify data

Start by pulling everything out of Shopify. From the admin, use Products → Export and Customers → Export to generate CSV files, and export orders from the Orders screen. For catalogs beyond a few hundred SKUs, a dedicated migration tool (Cart2Cart, LitExtension, or a WooCommerce import plugin) preserves variants, images, and category relationships far more reliably than raw CSVs.

• Export products, including variants, images, tags, and collections.
• Export customers and, separately, order history for accounting continuity.
• Export your blog posts and static pages, which the standard CSV skips.
• Crawl and save your existing URL inventory with a tool like Screaming Frog so you have a complete list of live Shopify URLs to redirect later.

Step 2: Set up WordPress and WooCommerce

Provision quality WordPress hosting (managed WordPress or a performance VPS), install WordPress, then install and activate the WooCommerce plugin. Run the setup wizard to configure your store address, currency, shipping zones, and tax rules. Install an SSL certificate and confirm HTTPS is forced site-wide.

• Choose a WooCommerce-compatible theme, or commission a custom WooCommerce build to match your Shopify storefront exactly.
• Set your permalink structure deliberately. Many stores strip the /product/ and /product-category/ base to keep URLs short and clean.
• Install an SEO plugin (Rank Math or Yoast) and a redirect manager before importing anything.
• Recreate essential apps as plugins: reviews, wishlist, subscriptions, currency switching, and email automation.

Do all of this on a staging domain or subdomain, never on your live store, so real customers never see a half-built site.

Step 3: Import and recreate your store

Import products first using your chosen migration tool or the built-in WooCommerce product CSV importer, mapping columns carefully so titles, SKUs, prices, inventory, images, and variants land in the right fields. Then import customers and, if needed, historical orders.

• Verify variants, product types (simple vs. variable), and stock quantities on a sample of imported items.
• Confirm every product image transferred and re-linked correctly, since broken image URLs are the most common import failure.
• Recreate collections as WooCommerce categories and tags, and rebuild any menu structure.
• Rebuild your homepage, cart, and checkout layouts, plus manually recreated meta titles and descriptions for top-performing pages.
• Set up and test your payment gateway with a real transaction in test mode before launch.

Step 4: Map and implement 301 redirects

This is the single most important step for protecting SEO. Because the URL prefixes differ, every old Shopify URL must point to its new WooCommerce equivalent with a 301 (permanent) redirect, which passes the majority of link equity to the new address and tells Google the page has moved for good.

• Map /products/handle → the new WooCommerce product URL.
• Map /collections/name → the matching product category page.
• Map /blogs/news/post and /pages/about → their new WordPress paths.
• Redirect at the pattern level where possible, then handle one-off exceptions individually.

Build a comprehensive spreadsheet pairing every old URL to its new one before launch day. Our guide on building a 301 redirect map for a website migration shows the exact format, and if the catalog is large, our website migration services team can generate and QA the full map for you.

Step 5: Launch, point DNS, and test everything

When staging is verified and redirects are ready, launch. Point your domain's DNS A record or nameservers to the new WooCommerce host (Shopify does not let you host WordPress on their platform, so you are moving hosting entirely). DNS propagation can take a few hours, during which some visitors see the old store and some the new one, so keep both live until propagation completes.

• Place a full test order end to end, including payment, tax, shipping, and confirmation email.
• Spot-check dozens of old URLs to confirm 301s resolve to the right pages with no chains or loops.
• Submit your new XML sitemap in Google Search Console and monitor the Coverage and Redirect reports daily for the first few weeks.
• Watch for crawl errors and 404s, and patch any missed redirects immediately.
• Verify analytics, tag manager, and any CRM or ERP integrations fire correctly. Custom data flows often need rebuilding, which is where custom website and CRM development earns its keep.

Realistic timeline and cost

A small catalog of under 100 products with a template theme can be migrated in one to two weeks. A mid-size store with a few hundred to a few thousand SKUs, a custom design, and app replacements typically runs three to six weeks. Large or heavily integrated stores can take two months or more.

• Hosting: roughly $20 to $50+ per month for quality managed WordPress hosting.
• Migration tools: a one-time cost from tens to a few hundred dollars depending on catalog size.
• Design and development: the largest variable, driven by whether you use a theme or a custom build.
• Professional migration: at eSEOspace's $80/hr rate, a typical done-for-you migration is a scoped, predictable project rather than an open-ended risk.

The recurring savings from dropping Shopify's subscription and per-transaction fees usually recoup the migration cost within months, while the SEO you preserve through disciplined 301 mapping protects the revenue that funds everything else.